It is cold in the rehearsal room of Het Makershuis, a cultural breeding ground in Tilburg. Wearing a thick cardigan over two sweaters and a leather, peakless cap on his head, choreographer Jordy Dik (31) has grown to twice his normal stature. He sits at the edge of the playing surface where he operates the mixing console for the music during a run-through of the new performance by Compagnie Tiuri: Please hold my hand. It is two weeks before the premiere of the new creation, the choreography is as good as finished.
“Sab, are you checking to see if it’s vodka or water?” Dik calls. Sabine van Riel giggles. In her opening solo she pours a full bottle over her head. While the sound of a rain shower sounds, she stretches her arms towards the sky in her soaking wet dress, slides her hands over her stomach and her face. Over and over again, as if she is controlled by a great sadness. The caring hands of Annemieke Mooij, who dries her, and Margriet Jacobs, who brushes her wet hair, bring comfort. Andrea Beugger wraps a coat around her shoulders.
Compagnie Tiuri is the professionally producing theater branch of Tiuri. This Breda workshop, founded in 2005, has designed a talent development process in which people with a (cognitive) disability work step by step on their theatrical potential. In the Tiuri model, everyone can work with theater and dance according to their own abilities. Starting with playfully exploring the magic of the theater (the Playground), those who get the hang of it can move on to the Workshop, where they receive guidance from experienced teachers and makers. Experiment and exchange with the creative field follows in the Vrijplaats practical lab, after which players can join Compagnie Tiuri.
The company for inclusive dance theater was founded in 2021. Performers with and without disabilities work together in professional, artistically driven performances. Free birds fly , You and me and all the others are nice recent examples. Dik has been awarded several times for his work.
Margriet Jacobs and Annemieke Mooij (right).
Photo John van Hamond
Andrea Beugger (left) and Sabine van Riel.
Photo John van Hamond
‘Connection with your heart’
“I actually want to get rid of that term inclusive. I prefer to call it radically human,” says Dik. For him, Jacobs, a woman with Down syndrome, is a true muse. “Margriet is a stage animal.” She has played a leading role several times, with lived experience, with an intensity and emotion that comes from deep within her. “In your stomach,” she says when asked, making a gesture as if she is reaching into her bowels through her throat. “That you grab it and pull it up.” Sabine van Riel also feels it: “It is a connection with your heart. But also with the people in this production, the people in the theater, the world.”
Van Riel, like Jacobs, has Down syndrome. She has developed technically at Tiuri and she quickly picks up all the new steps in rehearsal. When she is not in a performance, she dances in Tiuri’s workshop for three or four days. Jacobs has been active there five days a week for fifteen years. “They live for their profession,” says Dik. That’s the big difference with being community art projects in the asylum seekers’ center of Ter Apel, among others. “I need the people for those projects to convince to participate. The method for this is co-creation. Here I can add my own signature much more.”
“People, the great Margriet Jacobs doesn’t want to do abdominal exercises!” he teasingly shouts
During rehearsal there is a lot of work to be done. “Yes, that’s a bit of dancing, isn’t it,” Dik chuckles as Jacobs is panting in between. And when she slacks off a bit during the warm-up, he teasingly calls out: “People, the great Margriet Jacobs doesn’t want to do abdominal exercises!”
Difficult is quite strict, says Jacobs. “But not always. And I am also strict.” Van Riel thinks a little strictness is good: “He wants to make a choreography in his own way. That gives me more pride.”
As with a creation, everything is repeated endlessly. “And again from the beginning, sweethearts!”, sounds cheerfully from behind the mixing console. “We have a lot of new material, Favorites!” – Dik constantly throws around pet names and abbreviations.
Sabine van Riel and Andrea Beugger (right) in ‘Please Hold My Hand’.
Photo John van Hamond
An impressive, wailing cry
Once the passes are established, the fine grinding begins. All four have to memorize the choreography, Van Riel and Jacobs just as well as the two professionals. Dik also considers the two “Tiuris” as professionals and would like to see them rewarded as such. However, the current subsidy system does not allow this – Compagnie Tiuri falls outside all the boxes.
In surprisingly few rehearsals, the new performance has been built up into a collage of scenes, loosely inspired by the work of Pina Bausch. The café chairs at the back of the stage, the elegant evening dresses and the ‘floor covering’ of flower petals are subtle references. Singing along to an aria, Jacobs lets her wonderfully out-of-tune singing slowly transition into an impressive, moaning cry. The scene could have been transferred from a performance of the German Empress of the Tanztheater.
“We had doubts about that scene,” Dik explains. “Is that possible? I asked Margriet: ‘Hey, it’s quite false, do you mind?’ Her answer: ‘No. I’m making my voice heard.’ I thought that was so beautiful. That’s what it’s about. The liberation of a voice. A woman who demands her right to vote.”
A month earlier, this focus on the injustice that women still experience had not yet crystallized. Of Please hold my hand Dik wanted to pay tribute to women, to feminine strength and gentleness. In other words: “how cool women are.” During the rehearsal a month earlier in the Stokvishallen in Breda, the material was especially sweet, soft and peaceful, with caresses and hugs. But after watching documentaries about violence against women and listening to podcasts like She’s mine – “On the way to Christmas dinner with family, haha” – his idea changed. “If you look at the numbers… I was so touched.”
Despite the heavy content, there is a cheerful, friendly atmosphere during the rehearsals. There is also mutual trust: Mooij and Jacobs alternately throw themselves forward in a duet without hesitation to be welcomed by the other. In a fight scene, Beugger and Van Riel attack each other, which is actually nothing for the latter, according to Beugger: “Sabine is a ladybug, badness does not exist for her. But she does it.”
Walk through the performance ‘Please Hold My Hand’ with choreographer Jordy Dik in the middle.
Photo John van Hamond
Stumbling in high heels
At 58 years old, Swiss-born Beugger is the nesttrix of Please hold my hand. ZHe brings a wealth of experience with various Dutch companies and, just like Dik and Mooij, in community arts projects.
In the year we were founded, we had to beg if we could please perform. And look at us: we are in seven performances during the Holland Dance Festival
She danced the award-winning duet with Jacobs You and me and all the others. “We just match well. We both find theatricality more important than performing steps. Just like Margriet, I like to be in my fantasy world.”
Ultimately, Dik says, the performance is decent in your face with unmistakable lyrics and a tragicomic scene for Beugger who, stumbling on high heels, tries with all his might to keep all the balls (balloons in this case) up. From a raised position, Mooij lists all kinds of limitations that women encounter in public spaces. Because they are women. In front of the microphone, Van Riel quotes annoying male statements: “Are you having your period?”, “May I ask, do you have a boyfriend?” and, ominously: “You started it, didn’t you? You have to be quiet. Quiet. Quiet.”
At the end of the rehearsal day, Van Riel and Jacobs are picked up. Dik and the others clean up and collect all the Tiuri stuff, because after this the entire company will move to Nijmegen to finish editing the performance. It has already been booked, unseen, by many theaters in the Netherlands. Dik: “In 2021, when the Company was founded, we had to beg if we could please perform. And look at us: we appear in seven performances during the Holland Dance Festival and run from theater to theater!”
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